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Category: Politics

Trump’s gutting of foreign aid is a threat to global health

Trump’s gutting of foreign aid is a threat to global health

Jeremy Youde writes: In its chaotic first few weeks, one of the new Trump administration’s many targets has been global health. With a few strokes of a Sharpie, President Donald Trump halted nearly all U.S. foreign assistance programs, including those for global health, and started the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization. Trump made a range of false claims about foreign aid to support his moves, including spreading the lie that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent…

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Trump enrages Christian MAGA by hiring ‘prosperity’ pastor for White House

Trump enrages Christian MAGA by hiring ‘prosperity’ pastor for White House

The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump angered some of his Christian supporters on Friday when he named a televangelist who even some conservative evangelicals have labeled a “heretic” as part of his White House administration. The president signed an executive order establishing a White House Faith Office and chose Pastor Paula White-Cain, his ally and spiritual advisor, to lead it. White-Cain, 58, is a megachurch preacher from Florida who has endorsed biblical interpretations that some evangelical Christians believe go…

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Ultimate goal of Musk’s blitzkrieg on govt: machines replace humans; technocrats replace bureaucrats

Ultimate goal of Musk’s blitzkrieg on govt: machines replace humans; technocrats replace bureaucrats

The Washington Post reports: Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions. In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified….

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Kansas’ Sen. Moran, Rep. Davids sound alarm on delay of USAID food aid to starving people worldwide

Kansas’ Sen. Moran, Rep. Davids sound alarm on delay of USAID food aid to starving people worldwide

By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, February 7, 2025 TOPEKA — U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said a freeze on federal funding and change at the U.S. Agency for International Development left $340 million in lifesaving food grown in the United States sitting at domestic ports awaiting delivery to locations around the world where people were starving. On Friday, President Donald Trump said he wanted to shut down USAID, which served as the federal government’s primary provider of development and…

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Trump’s talk of a Gaza takeover masks a more immediate disaster

Trump’s talk of a Gaza takeover masks a more immediate disaster

Neil Hicks writes: The most important outcome of President Donald Trump’s White House press conference this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not Trump’s lawless and immoral musing that the U.S. would “take over” Gaza to create a new “Riviera of the Middle East.” While Trump’s outrageous comments, as they so often do, ignited dutiful praise from his supporters and instant condemnation from his opponents, the intense focus on the U.S. occupying Gaza and forcibly displacing its entire…

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Teen on Musk’s DOGE team, Edward Coristine, graduated from cybercriminal social network, ‘The Com’

Teen on Musk’s DOGE team, Edward Coristine, graduated from cybercriminal social network, ‘The Com’

Brian Krebs writes: Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant…

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Trump delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage

Trump delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage

John R MacArthur writes: Two weeks into the Trump administration, I’m still being asked by foreigners about the new president’s “political vision”. Some of them, especially the French and the British, might be excused for excessive politeness toward a country that in many respects they still envy and admire. But on most of the news programs and podcasts to which I’ve been invited, I’m still encountering earnest interviewers struggling to understand Trump from a conventional political perspective, no matter how…

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How Trump is emulating Hungary’s ‘would-be dictator’ Orbán

How Trump is emulating Hungary’s ‘would-be dictator’ Orbán

David Smith writes: A pitiless crackdown on on illegal immigration. A hardline approach to law and order. A purge of “gender ideology” and “wokeness” from the nation’s schools. Erosions of academic freedom, judicial independence and the free press. An alliance with Christian nationalism. An assault on democratic institutions. The “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has been long revered by Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement. Now admiration is turning into emulation. In the early…

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Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service says DOGE staff pose ‘single greatest insider threat risk’ ever

Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service says DOGE staff pose ‘single greatest insider threat risk’ ever

Wired reports: Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.” Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns. “There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s…

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IT professionals lay out just how destructive Musk’s incursion into the U.S. government could be

IT professionals lay out just how destructive Musk’s incursion into the U.S. government could be

Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost write: Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are…

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Musk to rehire Treasury DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, behind racist posts after Trump endorses idea

Musk to rehire Treasury DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, behind racist posts after Trump endorses idea

CNBC reports: Elon Musk said Friday he will rehire a DOGE staffer who resigned from a Treasury Department post after the exposure of his tweets advocating for racism and eugenics. Musk’s announcement on his social media platform X came after Vice President JD Vance urged Musk to hire the staffer back and President Donald Trump endorsed the view. “He will be brought back,” Musk, the head of DOGE, wrote on X in response to Vance’s recommendation. “To err is human,…

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Staffer with Elon Musk’s DOGE, Gavin Kliger, amplified white supremacists online

Staffer with Elon Musk’s DOGE, Gavin Kliger, amplified white supremacists online

Reuters reports: One of the people working with billionaire Elon Musk in his efforts to overhaul the U.S. government is a Berkeley-educated computer scientist who has boosted white supremacists and misogynists online. Gavin Kliger lists his job on LinkedIn as “Special Advisor to the Director” at the Office of Personnel Management, which has been spearheading Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce. His USAID email address was copied on a message reviewed by Reuters that was sent to staffers at…

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Musk’s DOGE teen, Edward Coristine, was fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

Musk’s DOGE teen, Edward Coristine, was fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

Bloomberg reports: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor. “Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.” A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm…

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Trump describes his Gaza plan as ‘a real estate transaction’

Trump describes his Gaza plan as ‘a real estate transaction’

The Times of Israel reports: US President Donald Trump said Friday that he was not in a hurry to implement his plan to take over and redevelop Gaza while relocating Palestinians to other countries. “We’re in no rush on it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. After repeatedly floating the idea that Egypt and Jordan take in some Gazan refugees while the Strip was being rebuilt — a notion rejected by Cairo and Amman — Trump earlier this week…

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Musk’s Treasury incursion puts the entire financial system at risk, former officials warn

Musk’s Treasury incursion puts the entire financial system at risk, former officials warn

Graham Steele and Emily DiVito write: Elon Musk’s unprecedented access to the US Treasury’s payment system deserves the public outcry that it has received. As former Treasury officials, we fear the situation is even more dire than it might appear. Musk’s recent actions, days after the Office of Management and Budget’s government funding pause that a federal judge quickly blocked, suggest a big and broad vision for a dramatically consolidated and politicized Treasury. This could have widespread effects on our…

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U.S. Treasury claimed DOGE’s Marko Elez didn’t have ‘write access’ when he actually did

U.S. Treasury claimed DOGE’s Marko Elez didn’t have ‘write access’ when he actually did

Wired reports: US Treasury Department and White House officials have repeatedly denied that technologists associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal spending flows. WIRED reporting shows, however, that at the time these statements were made, a DOGE operative did in fact have write access. Not only that, but sources tell WIRED that at least one note was added to…

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